Soon it will be St. Patrick’s Day and there will be the usual little buffet with chafing dishes on card tables at the back of the room at The Last Mile Lounge — and a green laurels over the bar back mirror, carefully put in place by Deano who claims multi-racial lineage. Corned beef and cabbage will be served. There’s usually a turnout of all-season, all feast regulars, and loyal once-a-year regulars. Parades up the TV….a fair amount of song from the first or second generation sons of Erin who inividually pop in for a “pint” now and and then, but, as I say, the regulars and the now-and-thens mingle happily festooned in green. Some will come early, but most will converge, in keeping with tradition, at noon on The Day.
You could expect to see Terry “Tarps” Walsh (an old fellow house painter with Stickey Sammartino who sees to it Columbus Day is a big deal at The Mile –and wouldn’t miss joining his old friend “Tarps” in an Italo-American version of “The Wild Colonial Boy” on St. Patrick’s Day.)
And for all events that afternoon, for all purposes, there will Paulie O’Brien, Paddy Byrne, Jo-Jo Sullivan, “Tiny “Mullen (who tips the scale at about three hundred pounds), Joe “Red O’Hara ( a name that for me evokes the memory of my late brother-in-law of the same name, hair color and complexion), Dennis Patrice (the only Haitian-Irish American I know), Emmanuel “Manny” Fitzgerald, who is African-American but always turns out in homage to that Irishman somewhere in his family tree, be he slave-holder or liberator), Mickey Fahey, “Mutt” Kelly, Jeff Roach, Dave O’Connor, Pete O’Connell, “Sniffles” McHoole, Declan McNamara and each will bring a wife or girlfriend, though there will be some stags.
it should be crowded, given that The Mile consists of very modest floor space.
And the Reverend Gene Rooney will come to provide a blessing and a poem or two — and to remind everyone that the day is a celebration of an Irish saint who, against great odds and amid enormous hardship, converted the craggy, pagan peoples of the Emerald Isle to the faith and that the faith lingers, though severely challenges in that land now, as Fr. Rooney, a native of Limerick, will remind everyone. (He is, otherwise, a parochial vicar at some tony suburban church but grew up , after his childhood emigration with his parents to the hard scrabble neighborhoods of Lynn.
So there will be prayers and songs — and “Tarps” Walsh’s augmented version of the traditonal Irish prayer (i.e., “May the road rise up to meet you, may the rain fall soft upon your fields, etc…), and Paddy Byrne will, as always, predictably declare, “was that what happened to me the other night !?– I thought I fell on my face, but it was the road that rose up to meet me!”
And “Tarp’s prayer (I said it was “augmented” — or, at least, extended, or desccralized from its ancient tradition, as it often is in barroms from South Boston to Block Island:
Tarps will stand in the middle of the room and intone,” for ALL of you sons of Ireland and your guests — my prayer is that your souls be in heaven at least twenty-four hours before the Devil even knows your dead.”
Amen.
19 Cent Notebook 